This is a major rewrite of PPQT to achieve certain goals.

(July 2015) This project is substantially complete.

(August 2022) Just for fun began updating to use PyQt6, this is purely a vanity project, nobody wants to know but me. Hit a snag with Hunspell and then discovered Spylls, a pure-Python remake of Hunspell. So continuing.

(October 2022) Testing pretty much complete, this program is functional! But only in Python 3.9 -- not a problem -- under MacOS Monterey on an M1 MacBook.

I should say, except for the Bookloupe panel, I haven't been able to build bookloupe on this machine.

Now, do I want to go to the boring effort of setting up virtual environments so as to test Linux and -- gag -- Win 10?

Answer: only if somebody else seriously wanted to use the program. And who would, unless I were to advertise it on the PPTools forum of PGDP?

PPQT (Post-processing in Python and Qt) is an integrated application meant to assist the volunteers who post-process etexts prepared at Distributed Proofreaders (PGDP.net). It provides a text editor that integrates a number of features useful during post-processing, including display of the book's scanned pages, regular expression find/replace, spellcheck, pagination, footnoting and use of the volunteer-built text-inspector "bookloupe".

PPQT is Copyright(C) 2013, 2014 David Cortesi (tallforasmurf@yahoo.com)

License (GPL-3.0) : PPQT is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You can find a copy of the GNU General Public License in the file
COPYING.TXT included in the distribution of this program, or see:
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

PPQT makes use of PyQt5, Qt5, Hunspell, and PyInstaller, all available for nonprofit use under one form of the GPL or another.

Features are basically the same as PPQT version 1, with these additions:

1. Is based on Qt5.4 and PyQt5.4 under Python 3.4, gaining some features and greater stability. (V1 uses Qt4 and PyQt4 under Python 2.7)

2. Multiple documents (books) can be edited at the same time (V1 allowed only one document at a time). Support for multiple documents forced changes in almost every module; many things that were global resources have to be localized to the document.

3. The metadata file stored with each book has a new format based on JSON.

4. Numerous smaller user interface changes and improvements removed minor restrictions and made the user experience better.

A major conceptual change was applied as a result of discovering that a multitude (well, two) new text markup styles were being used in DP: Ppgen in the U.S. and Fpgen by DP Canada. Each of those incompatible markups was the head of a toolchain that fed into batch utilities to generate HTML, EPUB and such end-formats.

Besides these, there are several markups (such as AsciiDoc) that accomplish the same thing: feeding a batch toolchain to create other book formats.

PPQT V1, following its model Guiguts, provided built-in conversion to formatted ASCII and to HTML. This is no longer a sustainable design because it would put PPQT in direct competition with at least two other toolchains, and at a disadvantage because those toolchains already handle EPUB, MOBI, and PDF, which PPQT did not (and which I have no interest in coding).

So PPQT V2 does not provide built-in conversion to ASCII or HTML. Instead it provides a clean, comprehensible interface to any number of Translators. A Translator is an independent module (dynamically loaded by PPQT) that takes a well-formatted DP book as input, and produces a new version marked up by some other convention -- such as HTML, or Ppgen. The new version opens as a new document in PPQT for editing.

It is my intent that other people supply Translators. I have written and included two example Translators, one for HTML and one for ASCII. (Thus PPQT V2 actually does support conversion to those forms, but in code that can be easily changed or replaced.)

Support for Translators is in this repository in the folder extras/xlt_dev. The documentation for the API is TranslatorAPI.html. skeleton.py is a skeleton basis for a new Translator. testing.py is a simple translator that writes a document showing all the API inputs it received.